Ethereum, Bitcoin and many of the major cryptocurrencies are back in the green with the finger being pointed at Wall Street legends George Soros and John D. Rockefeller who are allegedly investing.

Although it’s still early days, 2018 has not been a great start for crypto with the price of Bitcoin plummeting from record highs.

What caused the crash? It would appear that several elements played a part but the massive tax bills American traders have racked up, estimated to be in the region of $25bn, are undoubtedly a factor, combined with regulatory uncertainty in several Asian countries and tech giants such as Facebook and Google banning adverts related to crypto.

Billionaire investment fund Soros Fund Management has been given the green light to trade in digital currencies, although the firm’s $26bn fund has not yet made a wager according to Bloomberg.

Venture capital firm Venrock, which was founded by descendants of John D. Rockefeller, recently announced it was partnering with a cryptocurrency firm from Brooklyn.

According to Hedge Fund Research, funds that invested in cryptocurrencies at the beginning of 2017 made colossal profits of around 3,000%.

It seems that April will be an interesting month for cryptocurrencies, as, at the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $7,147.92 with Ethereum at $415.72.

Launched just last week by Jersey-based financial firm CoinShares, the Ether Tracker One and Ether Tracker Euro exchange-traded note (ETN) has now surpassed $10 million since trading on Nasdaq Stockholm.

CoinShares combined assets under management (AUM) (which included the Bitcoin Tracker One and Bitcoin Tracker Euro) are now at $330 million since launching in 2015.

“When the group’s bitcoin ETNs – which are now at $330MM in AUM – launched in 2015, it took one year to attract the initial $10MM in AUM. The Ether Trackers achieved that in less than a week” says Ryan Radloff, Principal at CoinShares.

Due to popular demand by investors CoinShares is now providing professional asset research into the top 5 crypto-assets, this they believe is something new due to all previous research that was carried out more or less focused just on Bitcoin.

The first research is named Ether Asset Highlight launched today: https://coinshares.co.uk/#research

“We are excited to bring CoinShares Research to life as we begin to support the needs of the next wave of crypto investors. Now that we have a team covering ether, bitcoin and a few others on a full-time basis, expect more great coverage to come soon,” says Ryan Radloff, Principal at CoinShares.

The brand comprises two exchange traded bitcoin notes (COINXBT & COINXBE), two exchange traded ether notes (COINETH & COINETHE) and two funds (GABI & CoinShare Fund 1). All of these represent ‘first of their kind’ products in their respective categories.

For many investing in cryptocurrencies can be unfamiliar territory due to the complexity of managing wallets, dealing with exchanges and the related security concerns. ETN’s act as a gateway, simplifying the process for everyday investors who want to dabble in the cryptocurrency market but don’t know how.

Jersey-based CoinShares announced today that two Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) connected to the price of the Ethereum cryptocurrency can now be traded on Nasdaq.

Denominated in both Swedish Kronor and Euro, the ETNs are designed to track the price of Ethereum and are based on the average value of a select group of liquid Euro exchanges.

This comes as no surprise with other providers including XBT issuing similar ETNs for tracking Bitcoin last month and GABI, the first regulated BTC hedge fund combining the two entities to launch CoinShares who have crypto assets of around $300 million. These previous ETN’s were made available to investors through Hargreaves Lansdown.

Investing in cryptocurrencies have been notoriously difficult for everyday investors due to wallet, transaction and exchange complexities however with CoinShares historic NASDAQ announcement non tech-savvy investors will now have full access to the cryptocurrency market.

In the last 18 months at least fifteen cryptocurrency funds have launched and around five crypto-based investment products are currently pending review with regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“Today is a historical moment for Ethereum and ether as an asset; and for the future of crypto-assets. It was a little over two years ago that the bitcoin ETNs began trading – offering investors exposure to bitcoin via an established exchange for the first time. Today, we are able to bring ether to the market and mark another major first. It is important to remember how far and how fast the space has matured in the less than 8 years since this revolution began,” says Ryan Radloff, Co-Principal at CoinShares.

We put some questions to CoinShares in a short interview:

What type of investors do you hope to attract with the ETH ETNs?

Product is for any investor who has qualified access to Nasdaq Stockholm.

Can you give us an estimated $ price of what you think Ethereum will trading at by 2018?

No price target right now – though we did a valuation model in our latest Ethereum research which may be helpful

Do you plan to trade on other exchanges such in currencies such as £ or $ ?

Cannot comment on future plans of that nature, apologies

What other cryptocurrencies do you have in mind? are you open to other ETNs with other currencies?

We delivered this product because the market had been requesting it since last year. We will follow market demand for future products as well.

This year we’ve seen the launch of many ICO’s, with the majority just being blatant scams or just down right useless.

That said every so often a project comes along that not only only has a genuine purpose but also thrives in a blockchain environment. This week that project is Upfiring, a blockchain company aiming to revolutionise the P2P file sharing industry as we know it.

Utilising the Ethereum Blockchain, Upfiring has created a decentralised autonomous P2P network that allows anyone to easily share files regardless of if they are on a desktop computer or smartphone.

File-sharing is currently seen as an unrewarding process for both seeders (due to little to no return for sharing) and frustrating for downloaders (due to the lack of seeders and slow speeds).

Upfiring has a solution to address this. The company has developed technology which solves many of the current problems we see today with P2P file sharing such as seeding, searching, downloading, ratings, and peer evaluation.

In layman’s terms the Upfiring process is as follows:

A seeder shares a file through the Upfiring network

The file is encrypted by the platform

A downloader requests access to the seeded file but can only download once they have paid using the currency of the network which is UFR tokens.

Once downloaded and paid for in full the file can be decrypted.

The above is a seamless process that requires no technical; knowhow on the user’s part. Given that UFR is also a tradable currency allows both seeders and downloaders to utilise exchanges to buy and sell the tokens as and when required.

Despite file sharing existing since the early days of the internet recent statistics show that the industry has continually grown over fifty percent since 2008. With no sign of this slowing down the industry has long been overdue a technology overhaul to speed up and improve efficiency.

Some of the Issues with current file sharing platforms:

Lack of seeders

No benefit to seeders

Risk for seeders

Snooping/ privacy concerns

Massive disparity between file download and availability ratio.

Benefits of incentivised file sharing:

Seeders are compensated (resulting in more high quality seeds)

Larger variety of seeds

Seeds can be rated more effectively

Faster access and downloads

A self sufficient system that settles payment publicly

Upfiring is currently running an initial crowd offering where anyone can invest in the technology in exchange for Upfiring tokens. You can find out more about the project and support it at: https://upfiring.com/

Their whitepaper can be accessed here: https://upfiring.com/Upfiring_Whitepaper.pdf

After a laborious nine-week search Uber’s management board has voted to appoint crypto-friendly Dara Khosrowshahi as their new chief executive – a potential win for Bitcoin Ethereum.

Under Dara’s 12 year run, Expedia was one of the first major organisations to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment (back in 2014) and subsequently legitimising it. So much so that both Microsoft and Dell followed suit shortly after. Dara is also a personal investor in Bitcoin startup 21 inc and has been an influential promoter of blockchain technology and its uses in real world projects.

With Bitcoin dominating the early days it made sense for Expedia to start accepting the cryptocurrency, however three years down the line it would seem Ethereum would be a better all round solution.

Bitcoin has also encountered a number of issues of late, many of which have stemmed from its slow confirmation times and increased transaction fee’s. With neither of these issues being appropriately addressed it is impossible to use this currency in any time critical use cases. Ethereum however with its lightening fast conformations (which are soon to get even faster) and low transaction fees would be a well equipped contender. It only takes around 15 seconds for a transaction to be confirmed on the Ethereum network making it easy to pay as you pop out of the cab, as opposed to Bitcoin which would require you to… well we’re not quite sure how that would work.

Rumours around Uber accepting cryptocurrencies have long circulated but until now they been nothing more than internet chatter, with Dara’s appointment however it may well become a reality. These are exciting times for the cryptosphere.

Despite reaching all time highs of around $400 in mid June, Ethereum has been slowly declining. It hits its lowest price of $130 last Sunday. The coin has seen a lot of volatility and panic although this now looks to be abating.

Its steady incline over the last 48 hour period looks promising as it hits $190 at the time of writing. This trend is expected to continue with the price breaching $200 by the end of the week.

There is no one reason for Ethereum’s recent decline but the biggest culprit seems to be the Bitcoin split. This has caused panic and uncertainty for many traders across all altcoins resulting in a sea of red.

Also the millions of ETH being raised and dumped for fiat through the recent ICO frenzy has also fueled investor uncertainty and driven down the price.

Even now the recent Tezo Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is worrying many traders with the fear that the project will dump the $200 million equivalent raised on the market in the very near future.

The market cap has dropped from $36 billion to $14 billion. That’s a $22 billion loss with a two-month period.